RESEARCH ARTICLE

A cat-and-Maus game: the politics of truth andreconciliation in post-conflict comics

Henry Redwood1 and Alister Wedderburn2*1King’s College London and 2Australian National University*Corresponding author. Email: alister.wedderburn@anu.edu.au

(Received 20 July 2018; revised 27 January 2019; accepted 15 February 2019; first published online 14 May 2019)

AbstractSeveral scholars have raised concerns that the institutional mechanisms through which transitional justiceis commonly promoted in post-conflict societies can alienate affected populations. Practitioners havelooked to bridge this gap by developing ‘outreach’ programmes, in some instances commissioningcomic books in order to communicate their findings to the people they seek to serve. In this article,we interrogate the ways in which post-conflict comics produce meaning about truth, reconciliation,and the possibilities of peace, focusing in particular on a comic strip published in 2005 as part of theSierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report into the causes and crimes of the 1991–2002 Civil War. Aimed at Sierra Leonean teenagers, the Report tells the story of ‘Sierrarat’, a peacefulnation of rats whose idyllic lifestyle is disrupted by an invasion of cats. Although the Report displays strik-ing formal similarities with Art Spiegelman’s Maus (a text also intimately concerned with reconciliation,in its own way), it does so to very different ends. The article brings these two texts into dialogue in order toexplore the aesthetic politics of truth and reconciliation, and to ask what role popular visual media likecomics can play in their practice and (re)conceptualisation.

Keywords: Visual Global Politics; Popular Culture; Transitional Justice; Outreach; Sierra Leone; Maus

Introduction: Aesthetics, politics, and ‘outreach’Since the early 1990s, transitional justice (TJ) initiatives have been a prominent feature of post-conflict political landscapes around the world.1 As a discourse, TJ has shaped how internationaland transnational organisations have responded to crimes against humanity, war crimes, andother atrocities, while as a field of practice its prescribed methods for post-conflict peacebuildinghave come to predominate on the global stage.2 More recently, however, several scholars haveargued that the institutional mechanisms through which TJ is commonly promoted can oftenoperate at a distance from affected populations, in the process alienating rather than engagingthe people they seek to represent.3 TJ practitioners have responded to these concerns by develop-ing ‘outreach’ programmes in order to communicate their findings to local populations, as at the

© British International Studies Association 2019.

1Pierre Hazan, Judging War, Judging History: Behind Truth and Reconciliation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010),p. 8.

2For a list of current and historical TJ initiatives, see the Transitional Justice Database, available at: {http://www.tjdbproject.com} accessed 16 July 2018.

3Phil Clark, Distant Justice: The Impact of the International Criminal Court on African Politics (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2018); Alison Des Forges and Timothy Longman, ‘Legal responses to genocide in Rwanda’, in EricStover and Harvey M. Weinstein (eds), My Neighbour, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of MassAtrocity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 56; Rachel Kerr and Jessica Lincoln, ‘The Special Court forSierra Leone: Outreach, Legacy and Impact’ (2008), pp. 3–6, available at: {http://www.rscsl.org/Resources.html} accessed16 July 2018; Peter Uvin and C. Mironko, ‘Western and local approaches to justice in Rwanda’, Global Governance, 9:2

Review of International Studies (2019), 45: 4, 588–606doi:10.1017/S0260210519000147

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International Criminal Tribunals for both Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.4 Although reac-tions to these initial efforts have been mixed, the principles underpinning them have informedalmost all subsequent TJ initiatives: outreach is now very much part of the TJ playbook.5

What little scholarly attention outreach programmes have thus far received within IR hastended to focus on questions of ‘effectiveness’, understood quantitatively in terms of how widelykey messages have been disseminated to relevant publics.6 While these studies can offer someinsight into the reach and scope of particular outreach efforts, however, they are unable to provideany analytical or critical purchase on the sensitivities and complexities associated with the com-munication of institutional practices to a wider community. These methodological limitationsmatter because the messages transmitted as part of TJ outreach efforts are not politically neutral,and therefore require interpretation and evaluation. As Martha Nussbaum argues, ‘life is neversimply presented by a text; it is always represented as something’.7 Outreach should not be under-stood as a simple broadcasting exercise, then, but rather as a dynamic and productive discursiveintervention into specific, often fragile social milieus.8

One notable feature of recent outreach programmes that has received little attention within theliterature is their frequent use of comic strips, especially as a means of communicating with chil-dren and teenagers.9 This is a development that deserves critical attention for two further reasons.The first of these concerns the popular-cultural space that comics occupy. As Lene Hansenobserves, comics are ‘sociologically significant for the mediation and experience of foreign pol-icy’,10 and as such they form part of the ‘popular culture-world politics continuum’ that delimitshow global politics (including TJ) is seen, experienced, understood, and ascribed meaning.11

Secondly, however, comics also by necessity engage with certain formal conventions and expecta-tions that shape the messages they project. As Hillary Chute has argued, comics offer a ‘uniquespatial grammar of gutters, grids, and panels’ that together comprise ‘a form that is deeply rootedin the specificity of its medium as a source of cultural, aesthetic, and political significance’.12 To

(2003), pp. 219–31; Paul Gready, ‘Analysis: Reconceptualising transitional justice: Embedded and distanced justice’, Conflict,Security and Development, 5:1 (2005), pp. 3–21.

4Victor Peskin, ‘Courting Rwanda: the promises and pitfalls of the ICTR outreach programme’, Journal of InternationalCriminal Justice, 3:4 (2005), pp. 950–1.

5Kerr and Lincoln, ‘The Special Court for Sierra Leone’, p. 6; Clara Ramírez-Barat, ‘Making an Impact: Guidelines onDesigning and Implementing Outreach Programs for Transitional Justice’, Working Paper, International Center forTransitional Justice (2011), p. 6, available at: {https://www.ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-Global-Making-Impact-2011-English.pdf} accessed 16 July 2018).

6Peskin, ‘Courting Rwanda’, pp. 950–61; Ramírez-Barat, ‘Making an Impact’; Tim Kelsall and Edward Sawyer, ‘Truth vs.justice? Popular views on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Special Court for Sierra Leone’, The OnlineJournal of Peace and Conflict Resolution, 7:1 (2007), pp. 36–68. One exception is Kerr and Lincoln, ‘The Special Court forSierra Leone’, esp. pp. 9–14.

7Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Form and content, philosophy and literature’, in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy andLiterature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 5, emphasis in original.

8Cf. Michael Shapiro, ‘Textualising global politics’, in Michael Shapiro and James Der Derian (eds), International/Intertextual Relations (Lexington: Lexington Press, 1989), pp. 11–22; Cerwyn Moore and Laura J. Shepherd, ‘Aestheticsand international relations: Towards a global politics’, Global Society, 24:3 (2010), pp. 299–309.

9Mohamed Sheriff and Elvira Bobson-Kamara, TRC Report: A Senior Secondary School Version (hereafter SSSV), illustratedby Simeon Sesay (2005), available at: {http://www.sierraleonetrc.org/index.php/view-the-final-report/popular-reports/item/trc-report-a-secondary-school-version?category_id=16} accessed 16 July 2018. See also the ICTR’s 100 Days in the Land ofa Thousand Hills, available at: {http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/education/education.shtml} accessed 16 July2018.

10Lene Hansen, ‘Reading comics for the field of International Relations: Theory, method and the Bosnian War’, EuropeanJournal of International Relations, 23:3 (2017), p. 582.

11Kyle Grayson, Matt Davies, and Simon Philpott, ‘Pop goes IR? Researching the popular culture-world politics con-tinuum’, Politics, 29:3 (2009), pp. 155–63; cf. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books,1973), p. 5.

12Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 2016), p. 4.

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reach out towards a target audience with a comic, in other words, is to draw on a particular formaltradition that must be accounted for in any interpretive or analytical search for meaning.

Taking these observations together, one can see that there is a politics of aesthetics at play in TJoutreach programmes that remains under- or even unstudied within IR. This oversight constitutesone focus of this article, which explores a series of questions concerned with the visual politics oftruth and reconciliation: how do images produce knowledge about war, conflict, and the possi-bility of peace? And how does the comics medium enrich, dilute, or otherwise shape the messagesit projects?

In answering these questions, we build on the burgeoning IR literature concerned with visual andpopular culture.13 Commonwithin this scholarship is the hope that art and visual culturemight con-tribute to a reimagining of theworld: that it might ‘make us feel, or feel differently…make us think,and think again’.14 Yet this hope must also be tempered by the acknowledgement that a society’scultural and artistic output can just as easily be incorporated into programmes that reinforceexisting norms and hierarchies: what David Campbell and Michael Shapiro call ‘cultural govern-ance’.15 In addition to a hermeneutic question about the ways in which post-conflict comicsrepresent truth and reconciliation, then, this article also asks a political sociological questionabout the ways in which these messages interact with the wider discourses from which they deriveand into which they intervene. To what extent do the discursive demands of TJ frame the con-ceptualisation and presentation of ‘truth’ and ‘reconciliation’ in outreach texts? And what mightthis reveal about the politics of outreach more widely – about the relations of power immanentwithin a transnational TJ programme’s interaction with a community potentially engaging inother, more informal reconciliatory practices? With Frank Möller, we therefore ask not only‘what forms of knowledge … [about war, conflict and peace these] images produce’, but alsowhether they ‘widen … the discursive frames within which human activities unfold’, or closeoff alternative possibilities?16 These questions would appear to be of particular importance ina post-conflict setting, where the foreclosure of possibilities for thought and action would appearcommensurately to discipline any and all movement towards peace (however defined).

In pursuing these two axes of enquiry, we turn to the 2005 comic book commissioned by theSierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SLTRC) in an attempt to communicate itscore findings to Sierra Leonean secondary school students.17 The comic in question – which hasno official title but which we here call Sierrarat18 – was an important means through which theSLTRC and its partners hoped to engage with young Sierra Leoneans in the wake of the1991–2002 civil war.19 Our analysis has three main foci intended to mirror the institutional pri-orities of the SLTRC itself. Firstly, we examine the ontological assumptions underpinningSierrarat’s presentation and conceptualisation of reconciliation. Secondly, we explore the epis-temological framework informing its approach to truth. Finally we consider the temporal matrixthat enables each of these concepts to function as part of a broader narrative – as part of a

13The literature on the so-called ‘visual’ and ‘pop cultural’ turns is large and varied. A range of approaches and examplescan be found, however, in Roland Bleiker (ed.), Visual Global Politics (London: Routledge, 2018); and in the ongoing PopularCulture and World Politics book series from Routledge.

14Alex Danchev and Debbie Lisle, ‘Introduction: Art, politics, purpose’, Review of International Studies, 35:4 (2009), p. 775.15‘Cultural governance involves support for diverse genres of expression to constitute and legitimise practices of sover-

eignty, while restricting or preventing those representations that challenge sovereignty.’ David Campbell, ‘Cultural governanceand pictorial resistance: Reflections on the imaging of war’, Review of International Studies, 29:1 (2003), p. 57; cf. MichaelJ. Shapiro, Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (New York: Routledge, 2004).

16Frank Möller, Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorship and the Politics of Violence (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), pp. 19–20.17SSSV.18The comic has no official title because it is incorporated within the SSSV. We call it Sierrarat here for the sake of

convenience.19SSSV, pp. 5–11.

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transition, in other words.20 Taken together, these three foci enable us to evaluate Sierrarat’s rela-tion to the institutional context from which it derives. In addition, however, we also bringSierrarat into comparative dialogue with Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a comic with which it sharessignificant formal and aesthetic similarities, but which nevertheless displays a strikingly differentapproach to the emotional and social fallout of conflict and atrocity. While acknowledging thatthe two comics were created for different purposes and with different audiences in mind, bringingthe two texts to bear on one another nevertheless enables us to open up space from which toexplore the political limits and possibilities of the comics medium in a post-conflict and/or TJcontext.21

The article proceeds in two parts. The first outlines the historical background surrounding theSierra Leone Civil War and the establishment of the SLTRC, while the second undertakes a com-parative analysis of Sierrarat and Maus, as outlined above. It will be noted that although Sierraratappropriates Maus’s representational vocabulary, it does so to very different ends, in the processreinforcing messages that are reflective more of the fraught institutional context in which theSLTRC was operating than the political dynamics ‘on the ground’ in Sierra Leone itself. The con-clusion brings this broad finding to bear on discussions about the role that might be played bycomics in outreach initiatives. In particular, we suggest that the openness of the comics mediumpresents a formal challenge to any attempts on the part of TJ initiatives to prescribe a fixed pas-sage towards ‘truth’ and ‘reconciliation’ on behalf of the communities they serve.22 In this respectthey are ideally placed to contribute to the reconceptualisation of outreach’s place within TJinitiatives. Future attempts to incorporate comics into outreach programmes must therefore doso with sensitivity to the political messages informing (and informed by) representational choices,and to the ways in which meaning emerges through a complex interaction between context, con-tent, and form.

Sierra Leone: the conflict and post-conflict yearsThe conflict in Sierra Leone began in 1991 when the Sierra Leonean Revolutionary United Front(RUF) invaded the eastern regions of the country, led by Foday Sankoh and supported byLiberian President Charles Taylor. A complex civil war ensued, involving a multiplicity of prota-gonists who can be separated loosely into three groups: government, rebel, and internationalforces.23 These designations are ‘loose’ because of their mutability: what constituted ‘the govern-ment’ shifted continuously, for example. While President Joseph Momoh of the All People’sCongress controlled the state’s military forces at the start of the war, a 1992 coup by disaffectedsoldiers saw his deposition and the establishment of the military-led National Provisional RulingCouncil. In 1996, an advisor to the Council named Ahmed Tejan Kabbah was elected president,in the process integrating an anti-RUF paramilitary group called the Civil Defence Force into the

20On the relationship between narrative and temporality, see Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrative time’, Critical Inquiry, 7:1 (1980),pp. 169–90. For an analysis focused specifically on the ways in which narrative and time manifest themselves in comics,see Thierry Groensteen, Comics and Narration (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2013).

21In seeking to interpret the visual production of meaning, we draw on discourse-analytical techniques. These are applic-able beyond the study of language because, as Linda Åhäll points out, ‘the way we interpret the world is not limited to spokenor written words’. Linda Åhäll, ‘Affect as methodology: Feminism and the politics of emotion’, International PoliticalSociology, 12:1 (2018), p. 43; cf. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of VisualMaterials (London: SAGE, 2001), pp. 135–86.

22Cf. Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007), p. 10.23This section largely draws on the history of the conflict provided in Kirsten Ainley, Rebekka Friedman, and Chris

Mahony, ‘Transitional justice in Sierra Leone: Theory, history and evaluation’, in Kirsten Ainley, Rebekka Friedman, andChris Mahony (eds), Evaluating Transitional Justice: Accountability and Peacebuilding in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 2015), pp. 1–18.

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government’s official military apparatus.24 Although Kabbah was unseated by a 1997 coup, hereturned to power in 1998.

Among the rebels, allegiances also fluctuated. For example, while the RUF were the mostprominent of the numerous insurgent and paramilitary groups involved in the fighting, theywere also briefly aligned with the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, a splinter group fromthe Sierra Leonean military who were responsible for the 1997 coup against Kabbah.International forces, meanwhile, included private mercenaries such as Executive Outcomes aswell as international peacekeeping forces, first from the Economic Community of WestAfrican States Monitoring Group and then from the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone,a UN force with strong British involvement.25 These largely intervened on the side of the govern-ment, often to ensure continued access to Sierra Leone’s natural resources, including, but not lim-ited to, diamonds.

Underpinning this instability were the forces driving the conflict, which were largely those ofeconomic and political opportunism rather than entrenched division along ethnic, racial, or ideo-logical lines (for example). As such, the most prominently visible fault lines were those of age andgender rather than party affiliation or ethnic background.26 For example, many of the rebel fight-ers were disenfranchised young men, angry at their continued exclusion from the existing govern-ance structure,27 while all sides systematically perpetrated atrocities against women.28

In 1999, the conflict was provisionally brought to a close with the Lome Peace Accord. Thisagreement set out a TJ programme, promising a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in add-ition to amnesty for all that had participated in the conflict. The SLTRC would

address impunity, break the cycle of violence, provide a forum for both victims and the per-petrators of human rights violations to tell their story, and to get a clear picture of the past inorder to facilitate healing and reconciliation.29

Significantly, it was agreed that the SLTRC would include a mix of local and international staff, inan attempt to embed the commission firmly within Sierra Leonean civil society.30 However, theAccord fell apart in 2000 as fighting restarted, and the SLTRC’s formal establishment was there-fore postponed.31 In May 2000, after the RUF had captured five hundred UN troops, PresidentKabbah requested UN support in order to establish a tribunal to hold perpetrators to account forcrimes committed in the war.32 Kabbah’s request resulted in the abandonment of the initialamnesty agreement, allowing both for the prosecution of any person responsible for genocide,crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other serious violations of international law,33 aswell as for the creation of an international court, the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL).34

24Ainley, Friedman, and Mahony, ‘Transitional justice in Sierra Leone’, pp. 9–10.25Ibid., pp. 9–13; Tim Kelsall, Culture Under Cross–Examination: International Justice and the Special Court for Sierra

Leone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 25–30.26Gearoid Millar, ‘“Our brothers who went to the bush”: Post-identity conflict and the experience of reconciliation in

Sierra Leone’, Journal of Peace Research, 49:5 (2012), pp. 722–4.27Ibid.; Kelsall, Culture Under Cross-Examination, p. 30.28Millar, ‘“Our brothers who went to the bush”’, p. 725. See also Myriam Denov, ‘Wartime sexual violence: Assessing a

human security response to war-affected girls in Sierra Leone’, Security Dialogue, 37:3 (2006), pp. 319–42.29Beth Dougherty, ‘Searching for answers: Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, African Studies

Quarterly, 8:1 (2004), p. 41.30Ibid., p. 42.31Kelsall, Culture Under Cross-Examination, p. 31.32Ibid.33Ainley, Friedman, and Mahony, ‘Transitional justice in Sierra Leone’, p. 11.34Ibid.; Chris Mahony and Yasmin Sooka, ‘The truth about the truth: Insider reflections on the Sierra Leonean Truth and

Reconciliation Commission’, in Ainley, Friedman, and Mahony (eds), Evaluating Transitional Justice, p. 39.

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These post-1999 developments had significant consequences for the SLTRC. First, the creation ofthe SCSL resulted in a shift in focus away from the SLTRC as the primary instrument of post-conflictpeacebuilding and justice.35 This precipitated a dramatic reduction in the Commission’s funding,from $10 million to $4.5 million, leading in turn to severe staff shortages.36 In the process,President Kabbah was emboldened to exert significant control over the Commission, appointingallies to a number of key positions.37 In addition to the Commission’s precarious existential positionwithin the post-conflict Sierra Leonean landscape, however, its outreach programmes faced a num-ber of more practical difficulties. These included the exceedingly low literacy levels of Sierra Leone’spopulation, many of whom were largely unfamiliar with the SLTRC’s methods and goals.38 Thisproblem was even more pronounced among younger Sierra Leoneans, who had participated inthe conflict in large numbers and were therefore a key target audience.39 In order to respond tothese challenges a German NGO called Ifa Zivik offered additional funds, and in the wake of thiscash injection it was decided that a ‘Senior Secondary School Version’ of the SLTRC’s final reportshould be created, comprising a report summary and accompanying comic strip.40 With this,Sierrarat became part of the SLTRC’s outreach efforts, in which capacity it was distributed aroundSierra Leonean secondary schools. The following section will bring the comic into dialogue withanother, from which it took significant formal and representational cues: Art Spiegelman’sMaus.

The politics of truth and reconciliation in post-conflict comics: Sierrarat and MausIn this section, we offer a comparative analysis of two post-conflict comics that adopt almostidentical representational strategies, but in very different contexts and to very different politicalends. In bringing them into dialogue with each other, we seek to examine the ways in whicheach comic produces and projects a particular, meaningful understanding of truth, reconciliation,and the processes through which they might be achieved. This facilitates our evaluation of thevisual politics of truth and reconciliation, the possibilities and limits of the comics medium asa means of exploring these concepts, and the interaction between these aesthetic possibilitiesand the outreach efforts of TJ programmes.

The Senior Secondary School Version (SSSV) of which Sierrarat was an important part wasintended both to condense the SLTRC Report’s eight thousand pages into a more manageablesize as well as to simplify its message and style whenever it was considered to be ‘above thelevel of its target audience’.41 Although split into separate segments accompanying each of theSSSV’s eight chapters, Sierrarat was nevertheless intended to function as an initial access pointto the text as a whole: ‘It is hoped that the cartoon stories will not only make exciting readingfor the student, but also arouse their curiosity about the SSSV text and motivate them to readit.’42 The comic tells of a civil war in ‘Sierrarat’, and explores the aftermath of the conflict, inwhich figures such as ‘Ratoldman’, ‘Ratpapa’, ‘Ratabu’, and ‘Ratchild’ come to terms with theeffects of the violence (and their own participation in it) with the help of the newly createdTruth and Reconciliation Commission.

35Mahony and Sooka, ‘The truth about the truth’, p. 39.36Dougherty, ‘Searching for answers’, pp. 39–44.37Mahony and Sooka, ‘The truth about the truth’, pp. 38–9.38Rosalind Shaw, ‘Rethinking Truth and Reconciliation Commissions: Lessons from Sierra Leone’, United States Institute

of Peace Special Report (2005), pp. 7–8, available at: {https://www.usip.org/publications/2005/02/rethinking-truth-and-recon-ciliation-commissions-lessons-sierra-leone} accessed 16 July 2018; Dougherty, ‘Searching for answers’, p. 46.

39See also Clara Ramírez-Barat, ‘Engaging children and youth in transitional justice processes: Guidance for outreach pro-grammes’, International Centre for Transitional Justice (2012), available at: {https://www.ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-Report-Children-Youth-Outreach-2012.pdf} accessed 16 July 2018); SSSV, p. 4.

40SSSV, p. 4.41Ibid.42Ibid.

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Maus is a graphic ‘novel’43 conceived and created by Art Spiegelman over a twenty-year periodbeginning in the early 1970s, and commercially published in two instalments in 1986 and 1991.44

It is focused around Spiegelman’s Polish-Jewish parents’ experiences in the Second World War,during which both were transported to and detained in Auschwitz.45 Yet in addition to tellingtheir story, Maus also seeks to tell Spiegelman’s own, as he tries to access and understand a con-stellation of events that he did not experience directly, but that have nevertheless profoundlyshaped him. Maus is not just a survivors’ tale, then, but also a child-of-survivors’ tale. It is forthis reason that it has become a key text for scholars interested in the social construction of mem-ory across generations; what Marianne Hirsch has called ‘post-memory’.46 As James Young hasobserved,Maus’s narrative ‘interweaves both events of the Holocaust and the ways they are passeddown to us’, encouraging reflection not only on the events being remembered, but also on thememorialising process itself.47 Crucially, for Young as for many other commentators, the ambi-guity of Maus’s narrative style is inextricable from the fragmented (or fragmentable) sequentialityof its medium.48 It is for this reason that it is an ideal site – despite its dislocation from any for-mal TJ mechanism – from which to assess the possibilities afforded by comics in relation to peaceand conflict.

Both Sierrarat andMaus concern themselves with periods of extreme, systemic violence as wellas with subsequent efforts to understand and come to terms with the events they narrate anddepict. In this regard they are not unique: the use of comics either by post-conflict peacebuildinginstitutions or as a way of exploring personal trauma is now fairly well established.49 Our reasonsfor bringing them together in this article go beyond their shared subject matter, however:Sierrarat andMaus both adopt near-identical representational tropes in order to tell their respect-ive stories, to the extent that it appears highly likely that the latter directly influenced the former.Most obviously, both comics’ central conflicts are between cats on the one hand, and rodents onthe other. InMaus, each national or ethnic identity category is denoted by a different species: Jews

43As Hillary Chute points out, ‘graphic novel is often a misnomer. Many fascinating works grouped under this umbrella –including … Maus, which helped rocket the term into public consciousness – aren’t novels at all: they are rich works of non-fiction’ (emphasis in original). Chute herself suggests the term ‘graphic narrative’. We use the term ‘graphic novel’ here forclarity and familiarity’s sake. Hillary Chute, ‘Comics as literature? Reading graphic narrative’, PMLA, 123:2 (2008), pp. 452–65; cf. Ian Gordon, ‘Making comics respectable: How Maus defined a medium’, in Paul Williams and James Lyons (eds), TheRise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010), pp. 179–93.

44Art Spiegelman, MetaMaus (London: Viking, 2011), pp. 22–3, 293. Spiegelman began taping his conversations with hisfather Vladek in 1972, in which year he published a short comic about the Holocaust (also called ‘Maus’) in an ApexNovelties ‘one-shot’ called Funny Aminals [sic]. Art Spiegelman, ‘Maus’, in Robert Crumb et al. (eds), Funny Aminals(San Francisco: Apex Novelties, 1972), pp. 9–11.

45For the sake of clarity, we use ‘Spiegelman’ to refer to Art Spiegelman the author, and ‘Art’ to refer to Art Spiegelman thecharacter within the text.

46Marianne Hirsch, ‘Family pictures: Maus, mourning, and post-memory’, Discourse, 15:2 (1992), pp. 3–29; see also JamesYoung, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 2000).

47James Young, ‘The Holocaust as vicarious past: Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and the afterimages of history’, Critical Inquiry,24:3 (1998), pp. 666–99.

48Ibid., pp. 672–5. For a discussion of ‘closure’ – the interpretive work required to extract meaning from a series of static,usually demarcated panels, see Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperCollins, 1993),pp. 60–93. As Hillary Chute similarly argues, ‘Maus demonstrates how the vocabulary of comics – the narrative shapesits grammar offers – along with its visual surface, the extrasemantic layer of its drawn lines, conveys information while atthe same time accounting for the excess (or absence) of signification and reference.’ Chute, Disaster Drawn, p. 178.

49Jean-Phillipe Stassen, Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda (New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2000); Joe Sacco, Safe AreaGorazade: the War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992–1995 (Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, 2001); cf. Chris Boge, ‘Crimes against(super)humanity: Graphic forms of justice and governance’, in Thomas Giddens (ed.), Graphic Justice: Intersections ofComics and Law (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 219–35; Jérémie Gilbert and David Keane, ‘Graphic report-ing: Human rights violations through the lens of graphic novels’, in Giddens (ed.), Graphic Justice, pp. 236–54; MarnieK. Jorenby, ‘Comics and war: Transforming perceptions of the other through a constructive learning experience’, Journalof Peace Education, 4:2 (2007), pp. 149–62.

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are depicted asmice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, and so on. In Sierrarat, mean-while, Sierra Leoneans are represented as ‘rats’, while the invading force from ‘Liberat’ are described as‘disgruntled Sierrarat people who left the country and turned to cats’, in which latter guise they areportrayed throughout the comic.50 The similarity between each strip’s basic representational strategyis additionally underlined by the similarity of their respective drawing styles: black-and-white linedrawings with pen-and-ink. Despite the two comics’ obvious aesthetic similarities, however, thereare significant differences between their respective circumstances of production and dissemination.Sierrarat was shaped by its function as a communicative vehicle for the SLTRC’s outreach campaigntowards Sierra Leonean secondary school students, while Maus, in contrast, began life as a personalventure before belatedly being brought to market. Initially published in an underground comics peri-odical calledRAW, it eventuallyachieved critical and commercial acclaim several years lateronce it hadbeen taken on by a major publishing house.51 Spiegelman explores his relationship with his work’sunexpected commercial success inMaus’s second volume.52

These differences should not be underplayed or forgotten in what follows. Nevertheless, intheir (dis)similarity, the two comics open up vital terrain from which to consider the visual pol-itics of truth, reconciliation, and outreach. Although both Sierrarat and Maus can both be read asresponses to the emotional and social fallout generated by conflict and atrocity, their respectiveunderstandings of ‘truth’ and ‘reconciliation’ contrast in several striking and important ways. Inexploring these (dis)similarities, we seek to evaluate the potential contribution of the comicsmedium to debates about the visual politics of truth, reconciliation, and peace.53 This is a discus-sion which in turn facilitates an examination of Sierrarat’s place within the SLTRC’s outreachefforts, and enables us to draw conclusions about the ways in which TJ discourse has come toframe and discipline what ‘truth’ and ‘reconciliation’ mean and how they function on the globalstage. It should be acknowledged that our conclusions in this latter regard are to some extent lim-ited by the lack of available information about how Sierrarat was received by its target audience,including how widely and for how long it was read and/or taught in schools. However, we miti-gate for this data’s absence by drawing on ethnographic research examining the relationshipbetween wider Sierra Leonean society and the SLTRC, a dynamic and often tense associationthat informs our reading of Sierrarat as an ‘outreach’ text.

The following three subsections will explore the parallels and tensions between the two comicswith reference to the ontological, epistemological, and temporal frameworks underpinning eachcomic’s understanding of post-conflict possibilities and limits. We have structured our analysis inthis way in order to give us the greatest possible purchase on the politics of reconciliation (theaffirmation of which inherently relies upon ontological claims about identity and community)and truth (which by necessity comes bound to particular epistemological assertions and assump-tions). Examining the temporal scaffold within which these concepts are represented, meanwhile,enables us to understand them dynamically, as part of a transitional process or narrative ratherthan as static and unchanging archetypes.

Ontologies of reconciliation

Sierrarat makes a case for reconciliation understood as the restoration of total and complete unitybetween all Sierra Leoneans. ‘Reconciliation’, then, signifies ontological wholeness: in the strip’sfinal panel, five rats and two cats stand hand-in-hand in a circle, each making a declaration sig-nifying their individual and collective transcendence of the division, violence, and suffering thatmarked the Civil War. ‘Forgiveness’, ‘Repentance’, ‘Unity’, ‘Reconciliation’, ‘Peace’, ‘Never Again’,

50SSSV, p. 5.51The circumstances surrounding Maus’s publication can be found in Spiegelman, MetaMaus, pp. 76–9.52Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 201.53For example, as outlined and discussed by Möller, who explores the visual politics of ‘entertainment’ media – including

comics – to debates about spectatorship and the witnessing of war and atrocity. Möller, Visual Peace, pp. 163–77.

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and ‘Progress’ (Figure 1).54 The image’s depiction of harmony between ‘rats’ (including thosesubjected to the War’s violence, such as Ratabu, whose hands have been cut off by a cat militia)and ‘cats’ (including Catcutan, Ratabu’s dismemberer) seems to suggest that reconciliation issomething that occurs primarily between ‘victims’ on one hand and ‘perpetrators’ on theother. The comic’s presentation of these two subject-groups as different species reinforcesthese two identity categories by visually differentiating them. In other words, the comic’s aestheticvocabulary encourages the precise and immediate identification of ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’, andin so doing also produces the opposition between these two groups as the central division to beovercome in the transition towards reconciliation.

Sierrarat’s presentation of reconciliation in terms of a seemingly complete (re)unification ofpreviously opposed parties is ontologically suspicious. Poststructuralist and other scholars inIR and in other disciplines have long argued for the impossibility of what Michael Dillon callsa ‘metaphysics of presence’: an undiluted, logocentric wholeness of being, without lack or remain-der.55 Yet this is not simply a philosophical problem: in its apparent depiction of a sort of mil-lenarian, redemptive bliss, the comic also implicitly delegitimises the very lack or remainder thatany practical efforts at post-conflict peacebuilding will inevitably leave behind. In this account, itseems, everything can and should and must be precisely accounted for, put in its right place onceand for all. However, critical scholars of peacebuilding have long warned that such strategies can‘reify and validate the existing global and orthodox project of liberalism built into the liberal stateand international system’ by obscuring the violence that underpins the liberal project and dele-gitimising desires that cannot easily be incorporated into it.56

The division between ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’ that Sierrarat’s use of the cat/mouse motif bothsets up and resolves is further complicated by the fact that this is a fault line that has not com-monly been cited by Sierra Leoneans themselves. As Gearoid Millar has argued, the frequencywith which actors switched sides and the commonplace profession of multiple, provisional,and/or variable allegiances frustrates attempts to mark individuals as ‘guilty’ perpetrators or‘innocent’ victims.57 One consequence of Sierrarat’s prioritisation of this division is that itmasks the economic, gendered and intergenerational patterns of violence that have more fre-quently characterised the Civil War in the minds of those who experienced it. According toMillar, Sierra Leoneans have tended to make sense of the conflict in terms of structural factorssuch as poverty and lack of opportunity, for example, not in terms of individuals who can be clas-sified according to a binary distinction between those who perpetrated violence and those whowere victims of it.58

The shortcomings of the victim/perpetrator binary is particularly evident in the comic’s hand-ling of the delicate and ambiguous status of child soldiers: although one particular narrativethread sees two rat children called Ratlamin and Ratmanu coerced into fighting and committingwar crimes, another panel displays a child soldier as a cat (Figure 2).59 The comic’s indecision asto the victim-rat/perpetrator-cat status of these individuals betrays the shortcomings of its tax-onomy: child soldiers can be either victims or perpetrators, but there is no grey space in between,

54SSSV, p. 119.55Michael Dillon, ‘The sovereign and the stranger’, in Jenny Edkins, Nalini Persram, and Véronique Pin-Fat (eds),

Sovereignty and Subjectivity (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999), p. 117.56Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Introduction’, in Oliver P. Richmond (ed.), Palgrave Advances in Peacebuilding: Critical

Developments and Approaches (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 2.57Millar, ‘“Our brothers who went to the bush”’, p. 724.58Ibid., pp. 724–5.59SSSV, pp. 42, 110–12.

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Figure 1. Sierrarat, final panel.

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and hence no way to acknowledge the legal and ethical complexity of their status, in which theyare simultaneously both and neither.60

In this respect the comic is not only at odds with the experiences of Sierra Leoneans but alsowith the text it accompanies, which presents a far more nuanced account of difference, victim-hood, responsibility and guilt within Sierra Leonean society. The text goes to some lengths toemphasise the complexity and messiness of post-conflict Sierra Leonean society, recognising(for example) the ways in which rape victims were commonly ostracised from their societiesand families.61 However, in the comic itself, sexual violence functions as a vector through

Figure 2. Sierrarat, Rat children forced to conscript.

60Alcinda Honwana, Child Soldiers in Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 69; Pieter Brits andMichelle Nel, ‘The criminal liability of child soldiers: In search of a standard’, Journal of Psychology in Africa, 22:3 (2012),pp. 467–72.

61Jennifer Leaning, Susan A. Bartels, and Hani Mowafi, ‘Sexual violence during war and forced migration’, in Susan ForbesMartin and John Tirman (eds), Women, Migration, and Conflict: Breaking a Deadly Cycle (London: Springer, 2009),pp. 173–99; Megan MacKenzie, Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone (New York: New York University Press, 2012), pp. 110–11; Nirit Ben-Ari and Ernest Harsch, ‘Sexual violence, an “invisible war crime”’, Africa Renewal, 18:4 (2005), p. 1.

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which the victim-perpetrator distinction can be both reinforced and overcome: a rape victim whois welcomed back into her family after the conflict ends is one of the seven figures holding handsin this final panel.62

The problems that Sierrarat’s ontology of reconciliation encounters when brought into dia-logue with the complex dynamics at play during and after the Sierra Leonean conflict are throwninto still sharper relief when compared with Maus. Although Maus portrays Jews as mice andGermans as cats, reproducing the reified, racialised identity categories imposed by the Nazisthemselves,63 the partiality and contingency of this classification is made apparent in the numer-ous sections in which Spiegelman refers to his own creative process. In some of these, Art isrepresented as a human with a mouse mask, while in another, Art discusses with his (French,converted-Jewish) wife Françoise how she should be drawn: as a mouse, a frog, a moose, a rabbit,or a poodle.64

The cat/mouse trope is not adopted here in order to draw a binary moral distinction between‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’, then, but rather as a way of discussing and exploring the complexitiesand partialities obscured by such simplistic identity claims. In Spiegelman’s words, ‘I liked work-ing with a metaphor that didn’t work all that well … it would be fatuous to move in the directionof Aesop’s Fables. The work would just turn fatuous and fake.’65 Maus thus ‘involved[Spiegelman] producing, however contingently, identity affiliations … with which [he was]uncomfortable’, leading, as Hillary Chute has pointed out, to an unsettling tension between itsstatus ‘as testimony and history, despite … its [apparent] iteration in the funny animal genre[of comics]’.66 At the end of the comic, this tension remains unresolved. Maus does not endwith a statement of panracial unity, but rather with Art’s father Vladek asking Art to turn offhis tape recorder as he goes to bed. Drifting off, Vladek absentmindedly refers to ‘Richieu’,Art’s older brother, born in 1937 and poisoned by Vladek’s friend Tosha in 1943 in order to pre-vent his transport to Auschwitz.67 ‘I’m tired from talking, Richieu, and it’s enough stories fornow.’68 Maus, then, ends not with a vision of reconciliatory wholeness, but with a reminder ofone of the many absences that remain lurking at the end of the comic despite Vladek’s personalreunion with Anja – mother to both Richieu and Art – at the end of the war. In Vladek’s sleepyidentification of Art with Richieu, in other words, one can read a sense of the impossibility of anysort of transcendent post-conflict unity, and the necessity of working with that lack creatively andproductively rather than seeking to draw a veil over it.

Epistemology and truth

Both Sierrarat and Maus are intimately concerned with the production of knowledge as a meansof approaching, understanding, and coming to terms with past conflict and atrocity. Sierrarat, forexample, constitutes reconciliation as the by-product of a truthful understanding of the Civil War.In so doing, it identifies an inevitable and inexorable path from knowledge towards peace inwhich the former is a necessary condition for the latter: ‘We must know and understand, thenit won’t happen again’ (Figure 3).69 Yet the ‘truth’ that underpins the comic’s proposed trajectorytowards reconciliation is understood specifically as that produced by the institutional machineryof the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.70 The narratives constructed by the SLTRC about

62SSSV, pp. 93–5.63Cf. Spiegelman, MetaMaus, pp. 113–14.64Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, pp. 171, 201–05.65Spiegelman, MetaMaus, pp. 119–20.66Chute, Disaster Drawn, pp. 117, 156.67Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, p. 111.68Ibid., p. 296.69SSSV, p. 9.70SSSV, pp. 9–11.

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the Civil War are thus constituted not only as the truth, but also as a requirement for reconcili-atory peace in post-conflict Sierrarat/Sierra Leone.

As such, Sierrarat implicitly legitimises the SLTRC as the prescribed organ through which rec-onciliation must be achieved.71 This sits uneasily with the institutional and political complexitiesof Sierra Leone’s TJ programme, in which the SLTRC and the SCSL not only coexisted but alsocompeted for the right to determine, define, and establish truth about the Civil War.72 In particu-lar, the SLTRC’s capacity to gather testimony was compromised by the very establishment of theSCSL, because the existence of a trial court rendered it unable to guarantee amnesty as it had ori-ginally intended to do.73 This intricate and often fraught institutional relationship between truthand reconciliation within post-conflict Sierra Leone is obscured by Sierrarat’s disinterest in theCommission’s own complex place within Sierra Leonean politics, which serves to mask the inev-itable gaps and silences immanent within the knowledge it produced.

Foremost among these gaps and silences are the informal and culturally specific mechanismsthat many Sierra Leoneans had developed to deal with the trauma they had experienced. Theseincluded directed forgetting,74 ‘a practice whereby the discussion of violent events in public [wa]sviewed as objectionable’,75 which ran in direct contradistinction to the SLTRC’s emphasis onpublic confession and truth telling.76 This sets up an alternative understanding of the relationshipbetween truth and reconciliation in which knowledge about atrocity, when publicly establishedand/or professed, ‘makes that violence present and connects it to the person remembering’.77

Sierrarat’s focus on the need for a ‘truth’ mediated by the SLTRC thus neglects SierraLeoneans’ acute awareness of what had happened within their communities, and the methods

Figure 3. Sierrarat’s inhabitants demand a TRC.

71SSSV, p. 472This was acknowledged by the SLTRC report itself, which commented on ‘the … mutual failure of the [two] institutions

to harmonise their objectives’. Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Witness to Truth: Report of the SierraLeone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Vol. 3B, p. 430, available at: {http://www.sierraleonetrc.org/index.php/view-the-final-report/download-table-of-contents} accessed 16 July 2018.

73Kelsall and Sawyer, ‘Truth vs justice?’, p. 38. While the relationship between the SLTRC and the SCSL remained murkyin this respect, what is key is that much of the population (and especially perpetrators) feared that testifying at the SLTRCcould lead to prosecutions at the SCSL. Tim Kelsall, ‘Truth, lies, ritual: Preliminary reflections on the Truth andReconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone’, Human Rights Quarterly, 2:2 (2005), p. 381.

74Shaw, ‘Rethinking Truth and Reconciliation Commissions’, p. 8; and Rosalind Shaw, ‘Memory frictions: Localizing theTruth and Reconciliation Commission’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 1:2 (2007), pp. 193–5.

75Rachel Anderson, ‘Compromise without virtue: Male child soldier reintegration in Sierra Leone’, in John D. Brewer (ed.),The Sociology of Compromise After Conflict (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), p. 181.

76Kelsall, Culture Under Cross-Examination, p. 383.77Shaw, ‘Memory frictions’, p. 195.

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that they had already developed among and between themselves in order to manage it.78 It sub-ordinates these local ways of forgetting by insisting on an essential affiliation between official,institutionally mediated, public knowledge and the healing of social division.79

Sierrarat’s choice of medium undermines its prescription of the SLTRC as the sole meansthrough which the knowledge and truth necessary for peace could be produced. Comics areinherently reductive: in Scott McCloud’s words, they function according to a principle of ‘amp-lification through simplification’ in which an image is stripped down to a core (if partial) mean-ing that can then be emphasised in a manner unavailable to more ‘realistic’ modes ofrepresentation.80 This destabilises Sierrarat’s understanding of truth’s causal relationship toreconciliation, for two reasons. Firstly, because Sierrarat claims knowledge to be a necessary con-dition of peace that must therefore be encouraged to bloom in all its fullness rather than strippedback and knowingly distorted in the manner encouraged by the comics medium. And secondly,because Sierrarat understands knowledge as something that must be produced through the insti-tutional mechanism that constitutes the SLTRC. For McCloud on the other hand, as for manyother comics theorists, the medium’s fundamental aesthetic simplicity cultivates an interactiveapproach to the production of meaning. ‘The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity andawareness are pulled … an empty shell that we inhabit … we don’t just observe the cartoon,we become it.’81 The collaborative openness of the comics medium, in short, is ill-suited to theprescriptive pursuit of knowledge or truth within a closed institutional context from whichone’s target audience have largely been excluded.

InMaus, Spiegelmanmobilises precisely these features of hismedium in order to precisely acknow-ledge the aporias and impasses that define his attempts to distil truth from his father’s testimony:

Paradoxically, while the mice allowed for a distancing from the horrors described, they sim-ultaneously allowed me and others to get further inside the material in a way that would havebeen more difficult with more realistic representation, where one could constantly questionmy choices: ‘Is that what that guy looked like?’ and you know, I actually have no idea. It gaveme a certain degree of wiggle room, a certain kind of slack, about getting a detail wrong des-pite all my research.82

This is not at all to say that Maus is unconcerned with questions of accuracy or correctness: onthe contrary, Spiegelman repeatedly demonstrates an obsessive level of detail regarding the mater-ial minutiae of his parents’ concentrationary experience, including maps, architectural diagrams,timelines, and even a step-by-step guide delineating how one should repair the sole of a shoe.83

However, these impulses towards precision are presented in constant and irresolvable tensionwith the misrememberings, forgettings, and silences that frustrate and impede Art’s desire forcomplete, rounded knowledge. Aside from the absence of Richieu, Art is also unable to gathertestimony from his mother, who committed suicide in 1968 and whose diaries Vladek hasburned.84 Spiegelman thus exploits the representational latitude offered by the comics mediumin order to open up a productive tension with respect to the idea of ‘truth’. On the one hand,

78Gearoid Millar, ‘Local evaluations of justice through truth telling in Sierra Leone: Postwar needs of transitional justice’,Human Rights Review, 12:4 (2011), pp. 524–30.

79Although the comic portrays Ratabu’s reconciliation with his daughter, who has been a ‘bush wife’ to multiple soldiersduring the conflict (a role that has also involved bearing their children), it is notable that the process by which this recon-ciliation occurs is a confessional public hearing (‘I must know the truth… you have to tell me the truth. I need to know.’) thatin many ways mirrors the TRC itself. SSSV, pp. 94–5.

80McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 30.81Ibid., p. 36, emphasis in original.82Spiegelman, MetaMaus, p. 149.83Cf. Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, pp. 112, 211, 220, 228, 230.84Ibid., pp. 102–05, 160–1.

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there is ‘amplification through simplification’: the reductive aesthetics of the comics form allowshim to ‘get further inside the material in a way that would have been more difficult with morerealistic representation’.85 And yet on the other, this more abstract, emotionally informed engage-ment with his parents’ experiences also allows for a certain imaginative ‘wiggle room’ regardingthe empirical details. His desire for truth is thus accompanied by a simultaneous acknowledge-ment that ‘reality is too complex for comics’:86 that the processes of remembrance, communica-tion, reception, organisation, and presentation underpinning his narrative must by necessitydegrade the source material upon which that narrative is based:

My father could only remember/understand a part of what he lived through. He could onlytell a part of that. I, in turn, could only understand a part of what he was able to tell, andcould only communicate a part of that. What remains are ghosts of ghosts, standing on thefragile foundations of memory.87

Spiegelman’s use of the comics medium to emphasise the complexity, partiality, and fragility ofhis knowledge of the story he is trying to tell stands in contradistinction to Sierrarat’s attempt todistil the complexities of the Sierra Leonean Civil War into a singular and institutionally mediatedtruth. His self-reflexive understanding of the limits of his medium likewise contrasts withSierrarat’s apparent faith in a chain of communication that flows without degradation or inter-pretive interruption from an initial witness through their testimony to the SLTRC, and thenthrough the comic itself to the student reading it. And although Art’s obsessiveness with detailis everywhere evident, there is no assumed causal connection between truth and reconciliation:Maus is a book about coming to terms with loss and trauma, rather than overcoming it.88

Temporalities of peace and trauma

Sierrarat begins with a vision of Sierrarat in its prelapsarian, preconflict state – ‘a poor but peace-ful and beautiful country’ – which is then interrupted by an intrusion of cats from the neighbour-ing state of ‘Liberat’, sparking a civil conflict. It is this initial state of peace, or something very likeit, that the SLTRC seeks to bring about once more – a state of ‘lasting peace’ this time, in which‘the war won’t happen again’ (Figure 4).89 The comic thus constructs a circular timeframe inwhich Sierrarat proceeds from an idyllic past, through the difficulties of the Civil War, beforere-establishing a mature and permanent peace that resembles the prewar state in which the coun-try is found at the beginning of the comic. This temporal structure both organises Sierrarat’s nar-rative and delimits its sense of political possibility: bound up as it is with the paralleladvancement of truth and reconciliation, it describes a trajectory in which progress from conflictback to peace proceeds irrevocably and only from the knowledge generated by the SLTRC itself.

Because the comic’s circular temporality is designed to house a progressive narrative leadingfrom the establishment of the SLTRC towards reconciliation, the story it presents is linear andstraightforward. This is a depoliticising move insofar as it obscures the ways in which crises con-tinue to resonate after the events that constitute them. As Jenny Edkins has noted, ‘trauma is notexperienced at the time; it is belated. It returns in the form of dreams or flashbacks.’90 This dis-ruption of linear time is trauma’s defining feature, according to Emma Hutchison: ‘the past is feltso intensely in the present that trauma becomes distinguished most prominently by its belated

85Ibid., p. 149.86Ibid., p. 176.87Spiegelman, MetaMaus, p. 154.88Cf. Hillary Chute, ‘“The shadow of a past time”: History and graphic representation in Maus’, Twentieth Century

Literature, 52:2 (2006), p. 213.89SSSV, p. 10.90Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 40.

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return’.91 Bound up with an ontology that disregards the differences, lacks, and absences thatresult inevitably from conflict, and an epistemology that prioritises one particular institutionalformation of knowledge production over more informal strategies of forgetting, Sierrarat’s tem-porality similarly presents a closed system that precludes the possibility of diversion, dissension,or traumatic intrusion.

A key feature of the comics medium that would appear to lend itself more to the critical inter-rogation of linear time than to its reproduction is the temporal dislocation represented by the‘gutters’ that divide the panels. The gutter ‘fracture[s] both time and space’, in ScottMcCloud’s words, ‘offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments’ whose relation,coherent or otherwise, is subject to the interpretive labour of the reader.92 As such, the gutterfunctions much like Foucault’s description of the margins in an illustrated book, for ‘it isthere, on these few millimetres of white, the calm sand of the page, that are established all therelations of designation, nomination, description, classification’.93 For Frank Möller, these seem-ingly empty spaces are key to understanding comics’ political potential with respect to questionsof peace, insofar as they function as temporally indeterminate interstices that encourage ‘readers[to] get involved in the construction of the story-line by linking otherwise disconnected panels’.94

One way in which Sierrarat seeks to bypass the gutter is by making use of a narrator, whosedescriptive asides in caption-like text boxes seek tobridge the ambiguous space betweenpanels by sum-marisingwhatever information is perceived to be in need of clarification. ‘This is how it happened…’.95

Figure 4. Sierrarat, first panel.

91Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions After Trauma (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2016), p. 41.

92McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 67.93Michel Foucault, This Is Not A Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 28. We would like to thank one of

the anonymous reviewers for bringing this passage to our attention.94Möller, Visual Peace, pp. 170–1; cf. McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 63.95SSSV, p. 81.

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In the process, Sierrarat seeks to foreclose the possibility of alternative readings and counternarrativesthat might disrupt its depiction of a smooth procession towards reconciliation under thewatchful gazeandparental guidance of the SLTRC. Its implication is that the reconciliatory process throughwhich thehorrors of the Civil War are to be left behind is so thorough as to short-circuit any possibility of trau-matic surprises to come.

In contrast to Sierrarat’s linear framing of the passage from conflict towards reconciliation,Maus presents two parallel narratives folding into one another, the first set in wartime Europeand the second set in postwar America. One sees trauma at work repeatedly throughout thetext, collapsing the temporal distance between these two narratives, as when Vladek mistakenlyappeals to his dead son Richieu,96 or when Spiegelman’s early 1970s comic about his mother’ssuicide is reprinted in full.97 This climaxes in arguably the book’s most famous sequence, entitled‘Time Flies …’. On this single page, the comic shifts between its own multiple temporalities withsuch pace that they begin to bleed into each other visually – a coincidence that becomes onlygradually apparent as the viewer’s perspective is pulled back, frame by frame, to reveal a pileof corpses beneath Art’s drawing board.98

Acknowledging the lacks, absences, silences, and impasses that accompany and constrain anyattempt to deal with, know or move beyond past atrocity, Maus’s shifting temporal terraindemonstrates the reasons why ‘truth’ and ‘reconciliation’ in the senses advocated by Sierraratare more complex and fraught than the latter comic suggests them to be. Here the past is notfolded up and packed away, but instead plays an active and productive role in the present, insofaras it contributes to the ways in which subjects like Art and/or Vladek understand and positionthemselves in relation to the world around them. Achieving ‘closure’ through the reconstructionof a pre-traumatic state of affairs makes little sense in a world in which so much has been lost,and in which the shadows of the past continue traumatically to puncture the present, rendering itpainfully fractured and incomplete. Possessing no formal commitment to ‘realism’ and alreadypunctuated by the temporal ambiguity of the ‘gutter’, the comics medium allows for these mul-tiple, non-linear temporalities to appear in a single frame, layered on top of one another andthereby captured in a single act of looking.

ConclusionDespite the aesthetic, formal, and representational similarities between Maus and Sierrarat, thetwo comics offer starkly different responses to conflict, atrocity, and the possibilities and limitsof post-conflict ‘reconciliation’. In ontological, epistemological, and temporal terms, Sierrarat’sunderstanding of the conflict it describes (and the medium it uses to describe it) serves to obscureand potentially delegitimise lingering grievance or difference, alternative institutional or non-institutional mechanisms of knowledge-production or forgetting, and the traumatic interruptionsof the past. As such, it appears to function as an intervention into the competitive institutionalpolitics of the SLTRC within post-conflict Sierra Leone more than it does an attempt at ‘outreach’.

While it is perhaps unsurprising that Sierrarat largely reproduces the SLTRC’s understandingof its own role within the institutional politics of post-conflict Sierra Leone, it raises importantquestions about who and what precisely outreach is for, and how aesthetic media like comicbooks might contribute to its success. If the problem outreach initiatives seek to address is theperception that TJ institutions prosecute what Phil Clark calls ‘distant justice’, at a removefrom the communities they are supposed to represent, then one might reasonably ask whatpurpose is served by an outreach text like Sierrarat.99 Communicating institutional practice to

96Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, p. 296.97Ibid., pp. 102–05.98Ibid., p. 201.99Clark, Distant Justice.

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a particular social group is unlikely to be met with much positivity if that group already feels alie-nated from the institution in question. This problem is only compounded if outreach initiativesprescribe a particular vision of truth and reconciliation that is unable to accommodate the meth-ods and approaches that have already been developed by the people with whom they wish to com-municate. This is precisely what is at stake in Sierrarat. The comic’s presentation of the SLTRC asthe necessary and only solution to Sierra Leoneans’ problems is at odds both with the SLTRC’splace with respect to the SCSL in Sierra Leone’s TJ discourse and with the informal transitiontowards peace that many Sierra Leonean communities had begun to effect among themselves.

We do not believe this to be an indictment of the comics medium more generally. In fact,comics are in many ways ideally suited to contribute to a radical reconceptualisation of outreachwithin TJ discourse. If post-conflict outreach texts ought to seek to accommodate the experiencesof their audience and prospective readership, then one might look, with Hillary Chute to amedium that ‘engages presence in active and important ways, while also leaving itself open tothe provisional, partial, and disjunct’.100 Comics are ‘reticent’, in Thierry Groensteen’s words:they require the collaborative participation of their audiences in order to produce meaning.‘Not only do the silent and immobile images lack the illusionist power of the filmic image, buttheir connections, far from producing a continuity that mimics reality, offer the reader a storythat is full of holes, which appear as gaps in the meaning.’101 These ‘gaps’ should not be consid-ered limitations: on the contrary, they underpin the imaginative expansiveness and flexibility ofthe medium. It is here – in the involvement of readers in the production of knowledge about theconflict they have experienced and the steps required to move forwards – that we feel comics areof potential use to outreach initiatives.

Sierrarat’s limitations in these regards are thrown into acute relief when set side-by-side withthe text from which it appears to draw its representational vocabulary. While it may seem unfairto judge Sierrarat with reference to one of the most widely acclaimed of all comics texts, our turntoMaus is rather intended to provide an example of the sort of openness that the comics mediumcan afford when mobilised with thought and care. While the use of comics in order to commu-nicate with a population with low literacy levels makes intuitive sense, given the textual and pic-torial hybridity of the medium, the representational simplicity of the form does not by any meansmandate a closed and/or prescriptive approach to the narration and visualisation of conflict,atrocity, truth, reconciliation, and peace. The comics medium is not necessarily just a way of sim-plifying a complex mass of information, but can also play an active and important role in theexploration and communication of difficult and sensitive issues concerning conflict andatrocity.102

We conclude by suggesting another possible model for outreach initiatives involving comics.The PositiveNegatives project ‘explores issues of global concern [including conflict, migration,slavery, drug addiction and identity] through personal stories’, creating comics in direct collab-oration with contributors from a range of backgrounds and places of origin.103 Where possible,scripts are drafted in the field, in order to give contributors the chance to suggest alterations or tocorrect mistakes. This kind of approach would appear to be promising for outreach programmesbecause it potentially enables meaningful connections between TJ institutions and the populationthey serve to be built into the very act of producing an outreach text, rather than simply in itsdissemination. Whichever strategy is used, it must be remembered that the choices comicbook artists make are deeply political, and both reflect and produce wider frames of understand-ing that legitimise and delegitimise different realms of lived experience. For this reason, more

100Chute, Disaster Drawn, p. 34. The text quoted within her quotation is from Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub,Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 5.

101Groensteen, The System of Comics, p. 10.102SSSV, p. 4.103PositiveNegatives, available at: {http://positivenegatives.org/about/methodology/} accessed 24 January 2019.

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attention needs to be paid to the aesthetic politics of truth and reconciliation in the design andexecution of TJ outreach initiatives. This is in order to ensure that future efforts to communicateinstitutional processes to a wider public do so with a sense of the complex emotional, social, andhistorical contexts into which they are intervening.

Author ORCIDs. Henry Redwood, 0000-0002-8086-6917; Alister Wedderburn, 0000-0002-6328-2231

Acknowledgements. Previous iterations of this article have been read by Tim Aistrope, Claudia Aradau, Lindsay Clark,Kyle Grayson, Luke Hennessy, Rachel Kerr, Rhiannon Nielsen, Dave Norman, and Ben Zala. We are grateful to all ofthem for their engagement. Thanks are also owed to the RIS editorial team and the three reviewers for their constructiveand generous stewardship. This research has been part-supported by AHRC grant AH/P005365/1 and ESRC grant ES/S01117X/1.

Sierrarat is reproduced here with the permission of John Caulker, the former Chairman of the Truth and ReconciliationWorking Group in Sierra Leone.

Henry Redwood is an ESRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Author’s email:henry.redwood@kcl.ac.uk

Alister Wedderburn is the John Vincent Postdoctoral Research Fellow in International Relations at the Australian NationalUniversity. Author’s email: alister.wedderburn@anu.edu.au

Cite this article: Redwood, H., Wedderburn, A. 2019. A cat-and-Maus game: the politics of truth and reconciliation in post-conflict comics. Review of International Studies 45, 588–606. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210519000147

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